Recovered Bayesian superyacht transferred to Sicilian port after being raised from seabed
The white top and blue hull of the 56-meter (184-foot) Bayesian, covered with algae and mud, was kept elevated by the yellow floating crane barge off the port of Porticello, before being transferred to Termini Imerese, where it docked in the early afternoon.
On Monday, the delicate recovery operation will be concluded, as the vessel will be transported to shore and settled in a specially built steel cradle.
Then it will be made available for investigators for further examinations to help determine the cause of the sinking.
The Bayesian sank Aug. 19 off Porticello, near Palermo, during a violent storm as Lynch was treating friends to a cruise to celebrate his acquittal two months earlier in the US on fraud charges. Lynch, his daughter and five others died. Fifteen people survived, including the captain and all crew members except the chef.
Italian authorities are conducting a full criminal investigation.
The vessel was slowly raised from the seabed 50 meters (165 feet) deep over three days to allow the steel lifting straps, slings and harnesses to be secured under the keel.
The Bayesian is missing its 72-meter (236-foot) mast, which was cut off and left on the seabed for future removal. The mast had to be detached to allow the hull to be brought to a nearly upright position that would allow the craft to be raised.
British investigators said in an interim report issued last month that the yacht was knocked over by 'extreme wind' and couldn't recover.
The report said the crew of the Bayesian had chosen the site where it sank as shelter from forecast thunderstorms. Wind speeds exceeded 70 knots (81 mph) at the time of the sinking and 'violently' knocked the vessel over to a 90-degree angle in under 15 seconds.
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New York Times
4 minutes ago
- New York Times
For a ‘Twisted Tale,' Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten Became One
As the title character of the mini-series 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,' the actress Grace Van Patten had to convincingly embody a highly examined figure at the center of a real-life legal drama followed by millions. Even more daunting, she had to do it in front of Amanda Knox herself, an executive producer. Those close to Knox were stunned by the results. 'Grace, I haven't told you this yet — when they see you play me, they get chills,' Knox told Van Patten during a conversation with The New York Times last week. 'You just did it, and they were like, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.'' Van Patten gasped in response. 'It was some fusion that happened,' she said. 'Because a lot of it felt very subconscious to me.' The eight-part series debuts on Hulu on Wednesday. The chills were inspired, Knox said, partly by Van Patten nailing her personality quirks: her occasionally singsong voice, the snort in her laugh, the cha-cha in her step. These behaviors and others became ammunition for Italian prosecutors and the global tabloid machine during Knox's highly publicized trial for the 2007 sexual assault and murder of Meredith Kercher. Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student and one of Knox's three roommates, was found dead from a knife attack in the flat they shared in Perugia, Italy. Knox, a 20-year-old Seattle native who was studying there, and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian boyfriend of about a week, were arrested and imprisoned just days after Kercher was found. In 2009, both were convicted of the killing, with Amanda sentenced to 26 years and Sollecito to 25 years. In 2011, the ruling was overturned, and Knox returned to the United States. Then in 2014, Knox and Sollecito (played by Giuseppe Domenico in the series) were re-convicted of murder, a conviction that was overturned in 2015, ending the nearly decade-long saga. Another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted separately of the murder in 2008 and was released from prison in 2021, after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence. (Guede's original 30-year sentence was reduced on appeal.) A separate slander conviction for Knox was upheld earlier this year. She had implicated Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she had worked, and herself in a confession made under duress, which she had tried to withdraw almost immediately. (Lumumba was in jail about two weeks as a result.) In all, Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison. The mini-series recreates this legal roller coaster in an unconventional style. It is a prison drama, a courtroom drama, a love story and an anxious horror tale. And it is largely in Italian. Van Patten ('Nine Perfect Strangers,' 'Tell Me Lies') plays Knox from her 20s, when she was full of 'whimsy and optimism and innocence,' as Knox put it, into her mid-30s, when Knox was defined more by 'trauma and hauntedness and determination.' 'We asked her to play the best experiences of my life and the worst experiences of life,' said Knox, now 38. 'We asked her to do it in English and Italian.' The series also depicts Knox's decision, in 2022, to return to Italy to confront Giuliano Mignini, her nemesis during and after the trial. Mignini, the lead Italian prosecutor, had fixated on and promoted the image of Knox as a conniving, sex-crazed murderer. (He compared Knox to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, during the proceedings.) Tabloid headlines smeared her as 'Foxy Knoxy,' a childhood nickname lifted from her Myspace page. Onscreen, Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli) is a relentless figure, a smug monster to be dreaded. Knox's trip to Italy to face (and ultimately befriend) the prosecutor is used as a framing device in the series. 'This is not a show about the worst experience of someone's life,' Knox said. 'This is the show of a person's choice to find closure on their own terms and to reclaim a sense of agency in their own life after that agency has been stolen from them.' To prepare to play Knox, Van Patten had numerous video chats with her and spent time in Los Angeles with Knox and her two children. Knox was also frequently on set during production. It all helped the actress understand the complex emotions involved in such a nightmarish experience. 'I was able to go to those places because of how deeply open Amanda was and how deeply vulnerable she was with me,' Van Patten said. An interrogation scene, in which Knox is mentally and physically tormented by a team of Italian officials, was particularly intense to film, Van Patten said. (Watching Knox spiral and give way under what amounts to psychological torture is brutal viewing.) Van Patten was learning Italian throughout filming, but the show was largely shot sequentially, and those early scenes captured authentic desperation. 'I tried not to learn the other people's lines as much as I could so that I was in a state of confusion,' she said. Knox said the themes of perception and miscommunication are fundamental to the story. 'That clash of perspectives and cultures and language, and the tension there, that's the beauty of drama and it's the beauty of reality,' she said. 'It is what makes this so psychologically and emotionally complex.' Kercher (Rhianne Barreto) is mostly seen in flashbacks of quiet, playful moments of friendship between her and Knox. The limited screen time reflects real life, in which the media circus around Knox and Sollecito overshadowed Kercher's brutal death. Last year, Stephanie Kercher, Meredith's sister, told The Guardian that she found it 'difficult to understand' what purpose the mini-series would serve. 'Meredith will always be remembered for her own fight for life, and yet in her absence, her love and personality continues to shine,' she said. 'The Twisted Tale' was created by K.J. Steinberg ('This Is Us'), and executive producers included Monica Lewinsky; Knox's husband, Christopher Robinson; and Warren Littlefield ('The Handmaid's Tale'). It was Lewinsky who first approached Knox about dramatizing her experiences. In 2021, Lewinsky worked to reframe her own story as a producer on the FX series 'Impeachment,' about her relationship with former President Bill Clinton when she was a 22-year-old intern and the fallout from it. Lewinsky knows 'deep in her bones what it feels like to have a bad experience, the worst experience of her life, used to diminish her and the turning of her into a punchline,' Knox said. 'She has been such a trailblazer in the mission of refusing to be squashed, refusing to be limited.' 'I was really moved by how open people were to me,' Knox said of her collaborators. 'I felt supported not just as a source but as a storyteller in my own right.' Knox said coverage of her was informed and shaped by persistent cultural messaging that 'women are either sluts or virgins, and that they all secretly hate each other and would murder each other if they had the chance,' she said. She believes younger generations are more likely to scrutinize reporting and demand more nuance than the public did during her trial. Still, Knox said she was initially reluctant to saddle Van Patten, 28, with 'this baggage that I have been carrying around my entire adult life.' 'In the same way that I didn't want the dark shadow of being the girl accused of murder passed on to my daughter,' Knox said, 'I didn't want that to pass on to Grace.' Van Patten had few preconceived ideas about Knox's story. She was a child when it happened and first learned about the case in the 2016 documentary 'Amanda Knox,' which included interviews with Knox, Sollecito and Mignini, among others. 'The show gives everyone the opportunity to understand it more and to form an opinion based on facts, and not what they were being fed at the time,' Van Patten said. 'She was just a 20-year-old girl going through this.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Where is Amanda Knox now? True story behind Disney+'s Twisted Tale explained
Disney+ true crime drama The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox examines the American's experience when she was accused of murdering Meredith Kerch in 2009. The experience of Amanda Knox after she was wrongfully convicted of the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher in 2009 is being explored in a new Disney+ true crime drama, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. Knox, now 38, travelled to Italy as an exchange student in 2007 to study in the city of Perugia, where she shared a flat with Kercher. In November of that year, Kercher was found murdered in the apartment; she had been sexually assaulted before she was killed. Police arrested Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, for the murder, thus began the American student's quest to prove her innocence, which is explored in the Disney+ series. Here is everything you need to know about the true story behind the series. What happened to Amanda Knox? Knox was arrested shortly after Kerch's body was discovered on 1 November, she and Sollecito were questioned by police over several days without a lawyer present. During this interrogation, Knox implicated Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she worked. Lumumba was arrested and spent two weeks in prison following the accusation, which was later proven to be false. Authorities believed Knox had accused Lumumba of the killing in order to divert attention away from herself. She and Sollecito were arrested and charged with murder on 6 November 2007. This was followed by the arrest of Rudy Guede on 20 November, whose DNA was found at the crime scene and who was extradited from Germany and later convicted. Despite his arrest, the prosecution did not drop charges against Knox and Sollecito. The pair maintained their innocence throughout their arrest but the media were frenzied in reporting about the case, particularly around Knox, even going so far as to give her nicknames like "foxy knoxy". Their initial trial began in 2009 where prosecutors alleged the pair had carried out the murder with drug dealer Guede. Prosecutors argued that DNA from Knox and Kercher found on a knife in Sollecito's apartment which police believed was the alleged murder weapon and linked the pair to the murder, while a bra found after the murder was said to have Sollecito's DNA. At the end of the trial, Knox was sentenced to to 28 and a half years in prison and Sollecito to 25 years. When the case went to appeal court in 2010, forensic experts said in court they could not be certain that DNA on the alleged weapon was that of Kercher, and Knox's defence team argued that there was no trace of Knox's DNA at the murder scene. Experts also argued that because DNA procedures weren't followed the evidence could have been contaminated. A court-ordered review of the contested DNA evidence revealed several basic errors in the gathering and analysis of the evidence, and it was concluded that no trace of Kercher's DNA was found on the knife. Knox and Sollecito were acquitted in October 2011. Speaking in 2019 after visiting Italy for the first time since her acquittal, Knox reflected on the way in which she was portrayed in the media and the traumatic experience of being wrongfully convicted. Per Sky, Knox said that she felt it was "impossible" to have a fair trial because she was seen as "the dirty, psychopathic, man-eating Foxy Knoxy" by many people. She said : "They convicted that doppelganger. That person was sentenced to 26 years in jail," she said. The verdict fell upon me like a crushing weight. I could only suffer in silence from my prison cell." While she was acquitted for Kercher's murder, the Italian court upheld Knox's conviction of defamation for falsely implicating Lumumba in the killing. Who killed Meredith Kercher? Weeks after Kercher's murder in 2007, Rudy Guede was arrested on suspicion of being involved in her killing. In 2008, Guede opted for a fast-track trial, which ensured there would be no media presence in court. Guede claimed that while he was with Kercher on the night of her death someone else had killed her while he was in the bathroom. He initially said Knox wasn't in the apartment, but later claimed she had been there when Kercher was killed. However, evidence was found not to support any of Guede's claims. He was later found guilty for the murder and sexual assault of Kercher in October 2008. He was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment, which was later reduced to 16 years. Guede was released from prison in 2021 after it was ruled by an Italian court ruled that he could complete his sentence through community service. Where is Amanda Knox now? Since being acquitted Knox has become an activist for those facing wrongful convictions, and is a journalist and author. She has written two memoirs about her experience, Waiting to Be Heard and Free: My Search for Meaning, the second of which was released in 2025. In an interview with People following Free's release, Knox reflected on her experience since being acquitted of Kercher's murder saying that she feels "haunted by Meredith" but "not in that bad way that people project onto me", adding that she feels her late friend's spirit "keeps reminding me of this valuable life and the privilege it is to live." Returning to normal life proved next to impossible for Knox after being accused of murder, she said: "As someone who went to prison I was very aware of what it felt to have your freedom taken away from you and I kept fantasising about getting my life back, and I kept thinking I am living somebody else's life by mistake and I just want to go back home, eat some sushi and go back to college again. "When I came home, I was rudely awakened to the fact that life no longer existed for me, not just because of these external forces like paparazzi chasing me down the street, stalking me where I lived, receiving death threats and all of that, I had changed too. I was no longer an anonymous student; I was Amanda Knox, the girl accused of murder. That was my legacy, and I had to grapple with that." Knox wrote Free in order to try and come to terms with her experience and, in the process, forgave the prosecutor in her case. She also found that while what she went through was "really extreme and isolating", it also helped connect her to other people. After returning to America, Knox met author Christopher Robinson in 2011. The pair became close friends before falling in love, and they married in 2019. They share two children together, a girl and a boy born in 2021 and 2023, respectively. In her interview with People, Knox shared how lucky she was to find Robinson: "What distinguished him was how not interested he was in the worst experience of my life… he gave me the grace and space just to be a person and to be a flawed person. Because one of the burdens of being accused of a heinous crime is that you feel like you have to be perfect just to prove your innocence every single day." As well as being an author and activist, Knox has said that she loves comedy and hopes to write and perform stand-up comedy specials in the future. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox premieres with its first two episodes on Disney+ on Wednesday, 20 August.
CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Pennsylvania State Police investigating deadly shooting in Ellsworth Borough
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